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Some Concerns About “The Responsibility Not to Veto”

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Some Concerns About “The Responsibility Not to Veto” 1 Some Concerns About “The Responsibility Not to Veto” Daniel H. Levine 5th April 2011 1 I would like to thank Nancy Gallagher, Jeff Zahari, Joshua Miller, James Armstead, Melissa Schober, Paul Williams, and an anonymous reviewer for this journal whose conversations and comments significantly improved this draft. I am especially grateful to Ariela Blätter and Paul Williams for kindly sharing an advance draft of their paper with me, and for welcoming the continuing conversation. 1 Abstract Ariela Blätter and Paul D. Williams propose that the international community could more effectively end serious abuses such as genocide and crimes against humanity if the permanent five members of the UN Security Council adopted a “responsibility not to veto;” that is, an informal agreement not to use their veto power when action to respond to genocide or mass atrocities is proposed and has the support of a simple majority on the Council. While there is much to recommend the proposal, it may not in fact promote the protection of civilians as it is intended to do. The historical record shows a number of instances where inappropriate military action was counterproductive to civilian protection, and it is not clear how easy it would have been for a military intervention to help rather than harm civilians in some cases in which intervention was not forthcoming. Ultimately, the RN2V proposal would be stronger if it were part of a package of more fundamental institutional changes, including improving the UN’s ability to respond to budding crises non-violently. Introduction Since the publication of The Responsibility to Protect (R2P), R2P has gained increasing international acceptance, including an adoption of the general principle by the UN General Assembly as part of the 2005 World Summit.2 Unfortunately, gross human rights abuses have continued — and the international community has often continued to do little about them. One barrier to action may be the UN Security Council (UNSC). The major substantive difference between R2P as articulated in the original report and in the World Summit outcome document is that the UN’s statement pointedly does not include the provision that coalitions and individual states may take action against serious abuses when the UN Security Council (UNSC) cannot or will not authorize them to do so.3 Even states that could (politically and militarily) act without UNSC authorization may be loath to do so without the legitimacy and political cover that authorization would bring. Yet, the permanent five members of the UNSC (P5) have divergent geopolitical interests and ideologies, and so where some members (or international activists) see a need for intervention, others are likely to have interests at stake or disagree about the need — and exercise their veto. To address this problem, Ariela Blätter and Paul Williams have suggested that the P5 adopt a norm they call “the responsibility not to veto” (RN2V).4 Where there is majority support on the UNSC for intervention, where genocide or mass atrocities have occurred, and where a P5 member does not have “vital security interests” at stake, they should abstain from using their veto power (5). RN2V would not, realistically, be adopted as a formal procedural rule, but as an 2 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. The Responsibility to Protect: Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty. Ottawa, ON: International Development Research Centre, 2001; A/RES/60/1. 16th Sept. 2005, p. 30. 3 International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect, pp. 53—55. 4 Ariela Blätter and Paul D. Williams. ‘ The Responsibility Not to Veto’. In: Global Responsibility to Protect ( forthcoming). Numbers in parentheses refer to this article. 2 informal norm that would prevent interventions from being unjustifiably blocked, and de-fang threats of a veto to do the same. The R2P concept represents a significant conceptual advance in the process of reconciling concerns for sovereignty and self-determination with the need to not let serious human rights abuses go unchallenged. And the responsibility element of the concept implies that, when gross human rights abuses are at stake, the P5 ought not see their use of the veto as a choice subject only to political calculation. But RN2V may not accomplish its goals of expanding the protection of civilians, for two reasons. First, RN2V implicitly privileges military action over non-military responses to human rights abuses. Second, it circumvents the veto based on the seriousness of abuses rather than any characteristic of the proposed intervention and thus risks making inappropriate interventions too easy to authorize. Blätter and Williams try to bracket questions of whether military interventions are generally (or ever) good solutions to human rights abuses, and of how sincere especially Western support for them is (4—5). But, since their proposal is about lowering the bar for intervention, it cannot be evaluated outside a context of concern for what kind of interventions it is likely to enable. An RN2V norm could be a good thing. But it requires that we do more to fix the context in which UNSC decisions are taken — addressing the remaining dissensus over the scope of R2P, building institutional support for actions short of military intervention, and taking more seriously the ways in which international involvement contributes to the problems that R2P is intended to solve — or risk that any norm making military action easier could do more harm to civilians than good. RN2V and Military Action Officially, the R2NV proposal is generic — “the P5 should not use their veto power to block action in response to genocide or mass atrocities” (5, emphasis mine). However, there is a strong tendency to understand this “action” as military in nature. For instance, when discussing whether or not the veto has been an actual barrier to R2P implementation, Blätter and Williams point out that no veto since the adoption of the 2005 World Summit outcome document “was cast in order to block a humanitarian military intervention” (8). A limitation of the Uniting For Peace process is that it cannot be used to “sanction military force nor to create a binding resolution” (10). In the three major cases they discuss as failures to address mass atrocities — Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur — the path not taken is either explicitly or implicitly UNSC-authorized military intervention (15, 16, 18, 29). A form of the R2NV proposal was put forward in the original ICISS report that gave rise to the R2P concept, but as an agreement among the P5 “not to apply their veto power... to obstruct the passage of resolutions authorizing military intervention for human protection purposes...” (quoted at 20). The US 3 Genocide Prevention Task Force recommended a US policy of refraining from veto with respect to “resolutions instituting sanctions and/or authorizing peace operations” (quoted at 24), and recommended the creation of an overall oversight position for genocide prevention as part of the national security staff. The limited cases in which RN2V may have made a difference are ones in which “a P5 member has threatened or used its veto power to block a proposed humanitarian military intervention” (28). The point of this litany is to show how easy it is to slide into implicitly equating “action” with “military action.” The fact that such an equation is picked up in several of the other sources Blätter and Williams cite indicates that the tendency is not peculiar to them. The focus on military solutions is understandable. By restricting the cases in which RN2V would apply to genocide and mass atrocities, the principle is restricted to emergencies, in which a robust military intervention that can halt the abuses by force looks like the natural or only solution. But if RN2V differentially lowers the bar for military operations, whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on whether the bar is too high or too low already. The (Non)Intervention Record Blätter and Williams clearly think that the burden on military intervention is too high — and with some reason. They are not alone in wishing that decisive action had been taken in Rwanda or Darfur. But the historical record is ambiguous. Their argument for RN2V focuses on three cases in which UNSC authorization was not forthcoming: Rwanda, Kosovo, and Darfur (15—18). Blätter and Williams are implicitly asking, “would RN2V make it more likely that a military authorization would be authorized in a case where genocide or mass atrocities were being committed?” Let us grant that the answer to this question is “yes.” The question we should be asking, however, is, “would RN2V make it more likely for civilians to be protected from genocide and mass atrocities?”5 Answering that question requires looking at interventions that have been authorized as well, and the actual record of success of interventions that have happened (authorized or not). Rwanda While the standard narrative of Rwanda is that “the international community did nothing,” that is not quite true. The international community did not do anything that stopped the genocide. But it was deeply involved in Rwanda. First, we should not dismiss the UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda (UNAMIR) merely because it failed to stop the genocide. UNAMIR did protect Rwandan civilians (either directly or 5 Relatedly, we should worry about, “would RN2V make it more likely that a military intervention would be authorized
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